Getting On With It in Hyperdrive : After ‘Cats’ and ‘Phantom,’ choreographer Gillian Lynne has set her sights on the film version of ‘Les Miserables’

The odds are that she even sleeps fast. It’s impossible to imagine Gillian Lynne, England’s top commercial choreographer, in any state of repose.

That’s probably one of the reasons why Lynne seems to be in such good physical condition. Even though she’s laughingly admitted her age by saying she’ll be 74 in the year 2,000, she still has a body that any member of “A Chorus Line” would kill for.

Unlike her American counterparts however, Lynne makes no real effort to hide her age. She seems proud of the crow’s feet and is the sort of practical woman whom you could never picture nipping off for a face lift.

Lately Lynne’s been strutting her stuff in rehearsal for a Burt Bacharach British television special that she has conceived, choreographed and is directing for Christmas broadcast.

In the studio she’s an unstoppable whirlwind dealing with 14 different things all at once. Camera angles, dance steps, costume approval and dialogue re-writes--to say nothing of selecting from the bewildering variety of luggage assembled as candidates for the “Trains and Boat and Planes” number.

Fame came to Lynne with “Cats” and she capped it off with “The Phantom of the Opera.” Being involved in the creation of two worldwide mega-hits has given her the financial freedom to pretty much do as she wishes and what she wants to do most now is direct a movie.

Her upcoming project as choreographer on the film version of “Les Miserables” (which she had nothing to do with in its stage incarnation) could be viewed as a trial run for that ultimate ambition.

A couple of seasons back Lynne took full control of a West End production when she directed and choreographed a revival of “Cabaret.” It didn’t go down too sweetly with the critics, but that hasn’t deterred Lynne from directorial aspirations.

One of the fascinating things about Lynne is that she’s an adult working in the youth-oriented world of dance gypsies. The Bacharach project is populated by a gang who dance as well as sing and even get to say the occasional line of linking dialogue.

Lynne and her co-creator, music man Marvin Laird, have taken Bacharach’s songs and meshed them together into something like a television pop opera. There are five leading characters: Juliette Prowse, Ute Lemper, Michael Howe, Philip Casnoff and Daniel Massey, who plays a philosophical bartender. Their lives are linked, split and re-glued via the lyrics, backed up and illustrated by the choreography.

Lynne, no matter what her chronological age, still looks like the best dancer in the rehearsal room. She’s a coaxer, a prodder who massages dancers towards what she’s after rather than terrorizing them into line.

She won’t take less than 100%, but she also knows enough about her profession to let some things go for the moment. Instead, she shoots Australian assistant, Joanne Robinson, a note. She’ll get back to it later.

Prowse, who has spent all morning in a costume fitting, materializes, watches for a couple of seconds and then without even being asked, steps in at the right place to join the dancers in a bridging step that links one song to the next.

Later, when she’s off-stage, Prowse sits on the sidelines working on an elaborately detailed crewel tablecloth which is big enough to give some indication of the long hours that even the most prestigious of stars has to spend waiting around in rehearsal studios and on sound stages.

Massey, in the meantime, is meticulously practicing pouring just the right amount into a cocktail glass without having to look down at it.

Lynne takes it all in and does so as if she herself were the camera. She’s constantly darting from corner to corner, trying to be a lens. From the outset this project has been storyboarded in her mind (with each camera shot worked out ahead of time so that when they move from the London rehearsal studios to the Liverpool sound stage, there will be little shooting time wasted).

For one big scene she follows a weaving path in, around and through the dancers so that they can get a sense of where the camera is going to be tracking.

Meanwhile, Martin James, who is a principal dancer with English National Ballet (the newly re-christened London Festival Ballet) has gone off with his parent company on an American tour. He’s being used in a specialty number that starts out very classical and slowly transforms into jazz dance.

Last year, Lynne, who began her dancing career with the Royal Ballet in 1944, returned to her roots to choreograph a work for Manchester-based Northern Ballet Theatre. That project, “A Simple Man,” started out on the tube as well and ended being nominated for all sorts of awards. It starred Royal Ballet alumnus Christopher Gable, the artistic director of the Northern company, as L.S. Lowry, the famed Lancashire artist who was then having a centenary anniversary.

Between them Lynne and Gable managed to coax Moira Shearer, another Royal luminary and the star of “The Red Shoes,” out of retirement to play the character role of Lowry’s disapproving, domineering mother.

On Nov. 21, Lynne danced in public for the first time in 25 years, replacing Shearer in an excerpt (with Gable) from the ballet at the annual Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium.

As soon as the Bacharach program is in the can, Lynne hot foots it back to Manchester to create her second ballet for Northern, this time inspired by the famed Royal Riding School in Vienna. Then it’s a Metropolitan Opera debut when she works with Harold Prince on “Faust.”

The twosome really clicked on “Phantom” and Lynne proudly points out that Prince turned over several of the scenes to her from the beginning of rehearsals. “He said what he wanted them to be like in general and told me to get on with it.”

It’s clear that getting on with it is a Gillian Lynne specialty. She’s good at spot decisions and obviously has enough faith in her own powers of judgment to keep the projects bouncing in the air.

Brushing her hair back, she gives a husky laugh and crows, “If my friends could see me now.”